I love following bloggers and using their lesson plans that are paired with children’s books! They have inspired me to create some of my own plans for my elementary aged clients. Over the winter break, I pulled out some of my seasonal books and created simple, functional lessons to pair with the stories. I also purchased and printed some great winter literacy plans from a couple other sites.

The first book, Tracks in the Snow by Wong Herbert Yee, is a nice read for my 1st and 2nd grade clients. This year, much of my caseload is working on irregular past tense verbs, so I decided to use this short and sweet winter story to target verbs. I decided to create a list using sentences with present tense verbs from the story. Children will take turns changing the target verb into the past tense and earn an animal track card or tokens for correct responses. The person with the most tracks or tokens wins! You can grab your list here for Tracks in the Snow.

My next book, The Missing Mitten Mystery by Steven Kellogg is a funny story about a little girl who retraces her steps outside in search of a missing mitten. I found this book by Scholastic for a quarter at my local library sale! I needed a lesson for some 3rd graders that focused on simple comprehension questions following a short reading and this book fit the bill! If you can find this book at your local library or bookstore, then you can use these comprehension questions!

Another score at the library sale was, In the Snow: Who’s Been Here? by Lindsay Barrett George. I highly recommend borrowing or purchasing this book because each page gives clues about a winter animal that has crossed the trail in the woods just prior to the children’s walk. Great for vocabulary building and answering who/what questions!!

Finally, I recently found some great worksheets for the award winning story,Owl Moon by Jane Yolen at this blogger’s TpT site.

I hope that you have found these resources to be helpful! If you have, then please take a moment to follow [my] blog and/or like my Facebook page, speech2me. I would LOVE to hear about some of your favorite winter literacy units, so feel free to comment below! Happy New Year!!

Nanette Cote, MA, CCC-SLP works contractually for Staffing Options and Solutions and has her own practice, Naperville Therapediatrics. She is a pediatric Speech-Language Pathologist in Naperville, Illinois who was recently certified in Interactive Metronome Therapy. Her blog, speech2me, was named one of the top Speech-Language blogs for 2012. For more information about this practitioner, please visit the blog at www.speech2me.blogspot.com or the Facebook page.